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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   21383 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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I don't know about that. If the Fall did subtract from nature, it subtracted quite a lot, to the point where most of creation we can access is far from fundamentally good.

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. “I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”

Which is to say, the order of things in nature absent our, the humans', vigorous actioned disagreement, does not always seem very good for us.

That take requires all sorts of assumptions which I not only think are unwarranted from any standpoint but definitely don't match up with the broader picture of Christian philosophy.

For one, do you imagine that most humans who have ever lived would have considered it evil for a fish to be eaten alive? Indeed there are plenty of extant cultures which eat live animals habitually. The real question is why it seems evil to us.

For another, it conflates evil with suffering, or pain, or even unpleasantness. This is often a locally-useful conflation but in the big picture it doesn't make a lot of sense. Neither does it make sense to equate platonic goodness with pleasure.

It assumes that animals are having the same sort of internal experience as we are. While they certainly have minds like ours, it's not clear that they have consciousnesses like ours. Indeed one take on Eden and the Fall is that the 'Garden' was a state in which we existed just like we do now but for awareness of such evil; that we weren't intended to take on the burden of temporal sapience until some future point at which such problems would have already been solved.

But what really bugs me about it is that it assumes that anything ought to be other than as it currently is, which implies telos, which implies a creator. Only by standing on the shoulders of God can one conceive of making moral complaints about the universe, and deciding that we see the full picture and are capable of independently evaluating such things occurs to me as downright conceited and petulant. Prideful, would be the Christian term.

What ought Man to be? Is a future in which we're all reduced to constantly-euphoric sludge a worthy one? I consider the Super-Happies of Three Worlds Collide. On the other hand, if Man is intended to become divine and unite with God, reducing morality to avoiding pain and enjoying pleasure would seem to be contraindicated.

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